After watching a couple of people I know argue about whether “economic freedom” or “social freedom” was more important, I had the typical libertarian reaction: That’s a meaningless question, they’re the same thing. All transactions are “economic” in an important sense, and all relationships between people are “social.” To violently repress any non-invasive action is to limit someone’s economic opportunities, and doing that tends to put people in a socially subordinate position.

Then it struck me that there’s another problem with that dichotomy that left-libertarians in particular are in a good place to point out, and it has to do with popular ideological assumptions about whose “economic freedoms” are most often violated.

For most people, the archetypal examples of something that violates “economic freedoms” typically involve repressing a wealthier or otherwise more generally privileged person, and their archetypal examples of something that violates “social freedoms” typically involve repressing a poorer or otherwise more generally oppressed person. When you control for that, it becomes a lot harder to distinguish between what’s a restriction on “economic freedom” and what’s a restriction on “social freedom.”